Gordon Fellman

1. At the start, my quotation about terrorism and civilians. That is accurate, I stand by it. It's odd that Horowitz lists it as if somehow ipso facto wrong or bad or whatever.

2. I don't know how many people in the sixties called me a radical, but that's okay with me, if by that is meant opposing the war in Vietnam at that time. Horowitz was a major figure in that movement. I was a minor one. (See a recent article in the Nation to learn about Horowitz's past. It tells a lot.)

3.The summary of my book caricatures it. I do not call for "universal brotherhood" in that book or anywhere else. That is for one thing an unacceptable sexist term. What I call for is redressing the imbalance where adversarialism is so far in modern history more salient than mutuality. In the book, I suggest that for us to survive, mutuality will need to become more salient than adversarialism. I never talk about ending war and conflict once and for all. I am explicit about how conflict is inevitable but need not take violent form. I do not predict the end of war but claim it is a goal worth striving for.

4. I don't talk about hatred for America or America being responsible for the hatred against it, although I do claim that what we do to other countries can caused resentments and hatred. Here is one of many places where Horowitz simply invents what suits him: I did say, in writing, that Palestinians' terrorism appears to be in some significant measure a response to humiliation, land appropriation, and all the violence of the occupation of the West Bank (and until last summer, Gaza). Not only is this not a justification for terrorism, it is only an analysis of possible motives for it. Nor was it a discussion of Islamic hatred for America. There is nothing anywhere in the piece cited or anything else I have ever written or said in public or in private that suggests I support terrorism. I oppose all violence, whether by ad hoc organizations like Al Qaeda or by states like China, Russia, the US, etc.

5. Horowitz caricatures my position (which he does not understand) on the Israeli-Palestnian conflict by blaming it all on the Arabs and seeming to lament that I do not. My analysis is much more complex than he sees it, but Horowitz seems, like so many people on the far right, to resist and perhaps loathe any explanation of anything that is of more than one dimension.

6. Behind what Horowitz calls the "facade" of peace studies is, he says , that I only want to "blame the West." Although he claims to have read my book, either he skimmed it rapidly or worked from a caricature of it, for the book is very heavily organized around an analysis that lays responsibility for violence in the world on all parties that engage in it. The book is about the dominance of adversarialism in history.

7. Now comes Horowitz at his most fanciful. He accurately quotes me as saying the war in Iraq was planned before Bush became president. I don't know if the site is still what it used to be, but the website for the Project for the New American Century made it clear as far back as the early 90s, that it favored a war with Iraq and that Paul Wolfowitz and others close to Bush were in on the planning that far back. This is common knowledge among people aware of the determination of the far right to have a war with Iraq. Horowitz acts as if I made up the claim. It is on record. It is hard to fault my claim that the war was pre-emptive. It was called that at the time. It is also hard to deny that Bush has abrogated international treaties. He has. My claim that Bush accused Saddam Hussein of ignoring the United Nations while Bush himself is a leader who has ignored the United Nations is easy to verify. Horowitz often seems to take umbrage at people pointing out realities he apparently does not like. I do not like them either.

8. My comparison of Starr and Saddam Hussein was explicitly addressing just one issue: the determination to destroy someone else. I was in no way comparing the magnitude of their destructiveness but pointing to the obsessive desire or need to destroy, which is common to all people whose goal is to destroy. Horowitz himself is a great example of what I call the compulsive adversary. His goal apparently is to oppose and destroy. If he'd read my book carefully, he'd have seen it is a major effort to move beyond adversarialism and its endless destructive consequences.

9. Horowitz has my comment about war and masculinity exactly wrong. My claim is that a certain kind of masculinity expresses itself in violence, including war. There are other kinds of masculinity out there. Think of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama. I prefer masculinity that is life-affirming, as that of those great leaders was, to that which is life denying. I meant my remark to refer to the most common or traditional form of masculinity. There are others.

10. I don't know what Horowitz means by the Faculty Coalition against the War, which he claims I organized, or how he sees me as a leader of opposition to the war (I spoke at the most once in public against this war), but suppose there were such a coalition and I did lead it, would that be illegal or undemocratic? What is the deal with Horowitz that he is accusatory of someone exercising democratic rights? And anyway, what does he mean by my "crusade against the war"? There is a national crusade against the war and I am proud to identify with it, but how does he possibly see it as my crusade?

11.When did I call conservative students for the war "freaks"? How come Horowitz makes these preposterous claims with no backing for them whatsoever? But suppose I did refer to them as freaks. So what? Look how Horowitz refers to people, including me. Insults are not nice, but they are common, and are certainly not actionable.

12. "Fellman is notorious for grading his students subjectively." Notorious? That's never appeared in any of the course evaluations I've seen. Where does Horowitz come up with that? And what does he mean by it anyway? There is a subjective element in most grading outside of the sciences and math; there has to be. The last part of his last paragraph is pure lie. I go out of my way in all my classes, as I have for 43 years at Brandeis, to make clear that students need to come to terms with the course materials as best they can and that where they wind up with them is their concern, not mine. There is nothing in my teaching that has anything to do with asking students, let alone requiring them, to "assimilate" to my view of the world. And where did Horowitz come up with the absolutely bizarre notion that this counts for one third of the grade or that "personal evolution" (a term I am quite certain I've never used) comes into my grading or any other consideration at grading time. I ask students to struggle with complex materials; where they come out of the struggle is, again, their business, not mine. And I don't do the percentages thing in grading. Horowitz's inventions here are astounding. He seems to value truth rather little.